Since the year 1978, the opening of China’s door to the outside world has led China to develop its own economic and social reformation (Wu, 1994). The nation is approaching to capitalism. With a long historical background, popular culture is subject to many influences. Under this rapid change, the author, Kevin Latham, who is a scholar of Chinese Culture, decided to write a book to express his opinion about the development in different cultures in China. The book is titled as “Pop Culture China! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle”. The author hopes to share his perceivable and future development in China popular culture.
From the author’s point of view, the phrase “popular culture” does not have any exact definition, but he wants the readers can have
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When considering how can revive Hong Kong film industry, we will first look at the significant changes of the local film industry between years, which indicates the rise and fall of it.
As mentioned by Latham (2007), in the past, Chinese audiences had always been much localized, restricted to a small proportion of the population in different types of films. After the year 1949, movie watching then became familiar to a large proportion of the population, and they mainly tended to watch same kinds of movie or the same movie.
Hong Kong film industry stands at a peak position in the 1980s and early 1990s (Ho, 2015). The industry has produced large numbers of movies at that time, thus leading to a humongous success at the box office. They are mainly hero action movies and comedy. From the data sources taken from Census and Statistics Department and Commerce and Economic Development Bureau, we can see local movies have brought a total of 1240 million Hong Kong dollars to the box office in Hong Kong in the year 1992. On the contrary, the box office of foreign films has reached 312 million Hong Kong dollars, which is only one-quarter of the box office of Hong Kong movies. This fact proved a golden era for the Hong Kong film
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As mentioned by Chow (2013), to save the dying Hong Kong cinema, the filmmakers in Hong Kong have urged the government to have a revision in its support of the film industry, such as flexibility of the Film Development Fund, which offering grants to different scaled productions. They emphasized there is a necessity that Hong Kong film projects are needing a more proactive support from the government in order to attract the investment, hence revives the declining movie industry.
Although in the financial year 2016, the government has announced to increase the subsidy for each film from 250 thousand Hong Kong dollars to 500 thousand Hong Kong dollars, but for applying the subsides, the requirements and procedures are often difficult and complex, mentioned by the director of local film Trivisa, Vicky Wong Wai-kit (Wong, 2016). Also, from the same budget announcement in 2016, the government revealed the budget plan to subsidize local films that are released in the mainland. The director of dystopian local film Ten Years, Au Man-kit Jevons, expressed his concern that local films may lose their local character because of the requirements for submittal and review, if they are to explore the market in mainland (Wong, 2016). If the government plans to provide more support to the development of local films, they should also subsidize Hong Kong films for